Friday was Beat Nite in Bushwick, the neighborhood’s semi-annual gallery night (the best in Brooklyn, we say), when most of the neighborhood’s galleries and art spaces stay open late with new exhibitions, open studios, performances and parties. This time there were 12 galleries participating—up from ten last time—and embarrassingly I only made it to four, highlights from which follow.
Among the new(ish) galleries making their Beat Nite debuts on Friday were Airplane Gallery and Small Black Door, both of which are housed in basements like scene mainstay Famous Accountants. As the evening’s main organizer Jason Andrew observed during the afterparty, “Apartment galleries are cool, but it’s all about basement galleries now. That’s the new thing.”
I’d already been to Small Black Door, a very well-finished space through a child-sized door on Palmetto Street in Ridgewood. But I made it to Airplane, which opened with a very impressive show—including works by Rico Gatson, Kate Gilmore, Austin Thomas and Adam Parker Smith—made all the more impressive by the journey to get there, down a quiet block of Jefferson Street, through a subtly marked basement door, and along a short hallway. Pictures from there, and elsewhere, below.
